Thoughts on Sobran

Part 1 of Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow

I have recently taken the time to read some essays by the late Joseph Sobran, former writer at the National Review, and ardent critic of American Liberalism. A devout Roman Catholic, lover of the works of Shakespeare, Sobran had an essay or opinion on just about everything during his lengthy career as an essayist and culture warrior. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking about his works with Chronicles Magazine, which you can listen to here:

As I discussed with Mr. Engel, I was working on my thoughts and seeing how well his 1985 essay, “Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow” has held up in 2023. You can read his essay, linked here. A lot has changed in the nearly four decades since it came out, but I wanted to give an honest assessment of the essay so here goes the reactionary of today looking back at the reactionary of yesteryear. While this is one of Sobran’s longer essays, I will have this split into two parts, with the second part coming out next Tuesday.

Politics and Idealism

Sobran opens this essay with a keen bit of reflexivity that I think hasn’t changed too much at all.

The main political line of division in the United States is between people we call liberals and people we call conservatives. The debate between them has been described in various ways; I would like to offer one of my own, based not so much on theory as on personal introspection.

For as much as Italian Elite Theory and Political Realism have come back into mainstream, along with several other writers of Christian teaching or Perennialism, the best writers in political spaces I seem to find myself in are those who can speak the most authentically, who can blend their theory with personal observation and introspection. Although I must admit in the 1980s the discussion over the budget, the Reds, and governance would be somewhat refreshing in the context of just how bad things are today.

More and more I find myself thinking that a conservative is someone who regards this world with a basic affection, and wants to appreciate it as it is before he goes on to the always necessary work of making some rearrangements.

Very Burkean, but the love of the world, love of home and hearth is at the heart of anyone on the right. There is an instinctive draw on the love the world and creation, a teleological drive (very much on the right) to leave the world better for one’s posterity, a world better not through destruction but tradition and preservation of what keeps society virile and creative. Much of this has been highlighted in

Dave Greene

’s YouTube Video Essay on being “Right Wing”.

Sobran continues;

"He who is unaware of his ignorance," writes Richard Whately, "will only be misled by his knowledge." And that is the trouble with the liberal, the socialist, the Communist, and a dozen other species of political cranks who have achieved respectability in our time: they disregard so much of what is constant and latent in life. They fail to notice; they fail to appreciate.

There are fundamental truths, eternal and consubstantial truths that exist within our world, any practicing Christian would be quick to identify them. It is our inability to recognize that there are things well outside our control, or that hubris to overcome knowledge has much of our society chained up like Prometheus but rather than our livers being pecked out by birds its a never ending “gender reassignment surgery.” What does bother me, which I found wanting in this essay (although his other works provide a better answer) is the “why” question many people go looking for when looking for answers on politics. When Sobran says;

For some reason, we have allowed the malcontent to assume moral prestige. We praise as "ideals" what are nothing more than fantasies--a world of perpetual peace, brotherhood, justice, or any other will-o'-the-wisp that has lured men toward the Gulag.

One has to has to wonder what that reason actually was. For many on the right, this tends to be the core subject of many political camps and various basic assumption groups. Everyone has some kind of answer, “we’ve abandoned the Ayran spirit” to “we’ve allowed women to run us men roughshod from our posts” - which are then answered by a “Return to Tradition”, “Take up Space”, or Catholic Integralism. So much like the left, the right of today, in a memeplex of homeopathic politics that constitute catchy soundbites and twitter ratios will find itself longing for the ideal win condition that will not be worked on by most men.

Nothing is easier than to image some notionally "ideal" state. But we give too much credit to this debased kind of imagination, which is so ruthless when it takes itself seriously.

This can be found today just as much as it was obvious with the Communist Regimes that existed in 1985 who for many of Sobran’s time and of generations past accepted the Soviet Regime as some kind of fact of life, the existential other that illustrates the worship of the self and the ideal above God, Nation, and Countrymen. It is the idealization, whether that be through autogynephilic tendencies brought on by rampant pornography, or the abdication of the self and responsibilities by handing the child the iPad while grocery shopping. AnteChrist rather than Anti, wherein we put the ideals and the self before God rather than God before ourselves, our wills surrendered to his before him but instead we’ve continued on this little rebellion. Sobran points out that the opposite of belief and piety isn’t disbelief but rather crassness and hubris. Such can be seen in the French Revolution, or in any society that wants to tear the old down and build anew.

Under regimes dominated by the dream of "building a new society," the state makes all the evaluations. It leaves very little room for the common exercise of the kind of appraising imagination the normal man and woman are endowed with. Everything is frozen at a certain level, no higher than the imaginations of the ruling mediocrities, who see no need of development in philosophy, art, or science (except applied science, as applied to techniques of war and conquest). A state that is willing to usurp the faculties of those it rules, by refusing to let them work, think, and discover freely, has already proved itself barbarous, even if it doesn't go on (as of course it will) to resort to concentration camps and mass executions.

These conservative musings are indeed what might be labeled as right-liberal musings. The political world of 1985 had a seemingly stable polity, the demography was not what it is today, and it was morning in America again. In 2023 the question that often comes up is, “well what if I don’t want to conserve anything?” These kinds of introspective questions come up all the time. A few people I know, like those in the

Old Glory Club

or like

Esoterica Americana

have a distinct appreciation for what came before, and wouldn't want to see the Founding American Superstructure be torn asunder alongside the progressive post-modernity we live in falls apart. When one addresses the "Liberal Question" of liberalism itself, which form of liberalism? What gets called liberal or passes for liberalism has changed so many times, which Paul Gottfried spends an entire chapter on in After Liberalism. I think this question will deserve another post in its own, as this isn’t the place to dive into a whole separate but related discursive space. How of much of this after all, is just a fight against entropy? Who is at the forefront of entropy? We certainly do plenty to ourselves as we age, fall into temptations, the prelest of thinking we could build the world anew, but are these natural follies of the human condition so inevitable that we are indeed to lose?

I ask this as Sobran poses this:

There is no question of "resisting change." The only question is what can and should be salvaged from "devouring time." Conservation is a labor, not indolence, and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability. In fact conservation is so hard that it could never be achieved by sheer conscious effort. Most of it has to be done by habit, as when we speak in such a way as to make ourselves understood by others without their having to consult a dictionary, and thereby give a little permanence to the kind of tradition that is a language.

Burkean indeed, and is quick to point out the errancy of what happens when we try to uproot things entirely, such as with prohibition. Laws cannot suddenly change a way of life, what is echoed in language and tradition, although if we can look at what happens now, law certainly can change the culture if the power can subvert those traditions and language. If someone can subvert The Father into saying God is Trans then power structures that enable the ability to change and program people especially in education, religion, and culture. When Sobran writes;

Christianity is the basis of our moral idiom. Anyone who doubts this should try to imagine imposing the U.S. Constitution on a Moslem or Hindu country. Roosting Christianity out of our political tradition is like rooting words derived from Latin out of our dictionaries. It remains embedded even when it isn't noticed. There is no real point in trying to take it out or, for that matter, to put more of it in.

Rooting it out is easier than one might think, as the easiest way to root out tradition is with heresy. The Holy Trinity, the God of our fathers, has been swapped out for moralistic therapeutic deism, something so far from Christianity other than a hedonistic prosperity gospel that is far removed from even the founding reformed protestant traditions that founded this country, many are fleeing such heresies in droves for places that have some kind of safeguard for its traditions. This can be seen by the rise of a paganistic element in the Western right, or outright secular rationalism that can be found in the techno-optimists of today’s non-liberal or post-liberal tech bros. Even then, I’d imagine some would like to uproot the Christian superstructure of the West. Sarcastic or not, it’s certainly there on the minds of some.

From Curtis Yarvin’s “Killing the Ghosts”

However, as it has been clear since the 60s onward, it is rather easy to create a new set of ideas and moral axioms, with the flexibility to do so within the precepts of popular will, the manufacturing of public opinion, and so on. Politics isn’t just the art of the possible, it’s the art of the hyperstition. As Nick Land points out in a 2009 interview,

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.

Manufacturing new hyperstitional components that are self-fulfilling, even able to bring about their own reality (or pseudo-reality from Lippmann) in this world of carefully curated stimuli can literally create ideas from ink. I say this as Sobran discusses the state of the Liberal and a remark from De Maistre.

A tradition incorporates so many implicit things that Joseph de Maistre rightly speaks of the "profound idiocy" of supposing that "nations may be constituted with ink." And yet the liberal is constantly trying to do approximately this, by manufacturing new laws, new "rights," repealing old ones, meanwhile, with equal facility. He regards the past (as in "the dead hand of the past") with contempt and shame; naturally, it inspires no affection in him, and he finds little to admire in it. He reserves his affection for kindred spirits, especially socialists, who are busy abroad imposing new schemes and cutting their own nations' ties to the past. ("I have seen the future, and it works.")

New laws and new rights are still being made for political client groups and such. Nations aren’t remade, regional identities aren’t erased through normal means. The Old South is still alive, and its existence is rhetorically and politically fought over in Washington and Twitter day in and day out. However, the contempt and shame of the past can be re-written, reimagined, done so in a way where “period pieces” portray the 1800s as a place as diverse as modern day London or New York City. Perhaps it would be best to say that for the champagne socialist, the breadtube grifter, in their own monetized and secure little homes that they can say “I have seen the future, and it works and it is diverse.” Much of this, while of its time, has presciently evolved into our current state of affairs with respects to technology, demography, and ways of political programming within social psychology. Gustave le Bon, but now with command and control via twitter.

The Rule of Law and Liberalism

Sobran moves to the second part of his notes with the heading of “The Rule of Law” with a key question that he’ll attempt to answer - “what is there to conserve?” We find ourselves today still asking that question, as appreciating and conserving are two constant activities. Some say the race, some say the nation, some say the old ideal, the faith, the right in whatever space that may be in or find yourself in is still debating this question. There is still much agreement, outside of portions of the right that wish to see this all burn to the ground is the following:

Political conservatism is focused on the rule of law. This may seem obvious and uncontroversial to the point of banality, since everyone thinks of himself as in favor of the rule of law as a matter of course.

A very Anglo, but also very American sentiment. The rule of law matters, but as many would ask, what law? You could say you want the rule of law, but if those who rule and enforce the law rule it in anarcho-tyranny, as his contemporary Samuel T. Francis wrote, then the desire to burn the structure to care the ecosystem becomes a tenable position. Sobran offers an answer, arguing that “Some of its worst enemies are legislators.” Yet like so many talking points on the subject of “the rule of law” or “tradition” one needs an actual definition. What is the difference between Law and Command? Are the Ten Commandments Laws? Sobran elucidates;

It is important to grasp the difference between laws and commands. Laws are impersonal rules, general, disinterested, usually negative in form ("Thou shalt not kill"). As Oakeshott says, they don't specify what substantive actions we are to perform, but merely attach "adverbial conditions" to whatever courses of action we may happen to choose. Commands, on the other hand, are positive expressions of will. They leave no alternatives. ("And the king said, Bring me a sword.") Laws are "observed," commands are "obeyed." To live under the rule of law is to be a citizen; to live under commandment is to be a subject or even a slave.

Not the most cut and dry distinction, but he highlights an understanding that I feel was once taken for granted, a part of a society whose rules and civility was seen by most save for its radical extremes. Taxation, as much as the meme’d quote “taxation is theft” has become it is still true. Confiscation for the means of securing patronage from your enemies to your friends. It has become the primary way in which the leviathan operates. “Even the old sense of the word "tax" has been lost. It used to mean a fee collected from everyone to pay for the operation of a government that was partial to none…” is something I wouldn’t find in my life at all, and he probably saw disappear in his lifetime. Taxes became the method in which policy for political groups became funded, and how you could get people to go to the polls. Lee Atwater saw this, as does anyone in their right mind when it comes to polling and electoral strategies. Of course the “popular will” or the concept of populism falls flat when higher, more powerful interests can silence or suck out the energy from the room. Trump can take the White House, as he did in 2016, but Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnnell, Eric Cantor, and several others weren’t on board with disrupting or losing the benefits of representing powerful interests. Legislators, even the “good ones” still are representatives of much more powerful and monied interests than the likes of you or I. On Power by Betrand de Jouvenel covers this this quite, later fleshed out by C.A. Bond, but the means of taxation and revenues for political projects make taxation one of the most effective means working against you with your own dollars.

Taxation is just one part of our legal framework that can position strong against the weak, the weak versus the well off, or the middle class surrounded on all fronts. But who are the weak? It’s a slippery definition, a never-ending chase of victim status (which that ol’ intersectionality is still close to batting a thousand) wherein the law becomes a vehicle for exploitation against the strong. This exploitation, either based on revenge, blood libel, or any other cause, can create a world that can take legislation and use it to further goals far from “original intent.”

On this view, the existing rules of society have been made by the strong, for the strong, and are inherently "exploitative" of the weak. If follows that if the weak are to be protected, it must be not by maintaining the rules but by making exceptions to them. The fluidity of "the weak" muddles the situation, but this has not stopped liberalism from making zigzagging demands of the law. In 1964, for example, it sought, and got, a federal "civil-rights" law that seemed to have the neutral character of real law, and was understood to mandate "color-blind" behavior; then it turned around and demanded that the law be applied in color-conscious ways, implying that the very color-blind application it had formerly promised would be, in essence, "discriminatory." So this law, which was impartial in form, was turned into a device for racial privilege, and citizens who had supported the law because it offered to protect the weak were now told that if it were applied the way they had been assured it would be applied, it would favor the strong!

I wish someone like James Lindsay would read this before foolishly thinking that someone is “Throwing Cantwell at Me”. Mechanical Causality applies quite well in the world of American Law. John Murray Cuddihy, who has seen an quite resurgence from individuals like Second City Bureaucrat and Bronze Age Pervert, is referenced in these discussions of law, order, and civility. Sobran references his 1974 book, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity in this section of the essay twice. Although, as Sobran notes that for a civil man, politics is part-time, and to a fanatic it is everything. The internet, and really all of mainstream culture nowadays is innately political. Everything is ran by fanatics, or at least it seems that way. Even the elite, with their over produced professionals lathered in grievance studies and view things in an distilled sense of dialectic materialism are fanatics in their politics. Even in the “non-partisan” orgs, such as the RAND Corporation, one can find the worst kinds of people with the worst kinds of politics working therein.

Thou shalt not suffer a bureaucrat to tweet.

Yet the “ordeal of civility” will continue on as the politicization of all things leads to more fanatics, more heterogeneity, and greater distrust of institutions lest you’re in a specific in-group that has a patronage network to your own ideal. This continues, however much intended or unintended to push the very problems of liberalism that Schmitt discusses in both The Concept of the Political and Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy now nearly a century ago. This of course, in Sobran’s view, is called Alienism.

Put another way, liberalism cultivates alienation. It does so because it has become a form of alienation. It has a heavy investment in estrangement. It is primarily interested in emergencies and social pathologies, and it makes policy prescriptions on the basis of abnormal situations, with no concern for the possible impact on the normal. It finds disease everywhere, without offering a useful image of health. And its remedies aggravate real diseases: redistribution, "gay rights," abortion on demand, appeasement--none of these policies has ketp its promises, but liberalism was never eally interested in the results.

There are two possible basic attitudes toward social reality. One of these, as I say, has many names, but I will call, it, for convenience, Nativism: a prejudice in favor of the native, the normal, and so forth, reaching an extreme in lynchings and pogroms. Its most ghastly form was German National Socialism.

The other attitude I am forced, for lack of a better word--or any word at all--to call Alienism: a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossesed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to "build a new society" by destroying the basic institutions of the native. The most terrible fulfillment of this principle is Communism.

This bit to me was something that I think we’ve seem come to a head here within recent events. Paul Gottfried’s recent essay about how wokeness comes from liberalism, not communism is worth bringing up on this issue. If Liberalism cultivates an alienation, (although the amount of communist/socialist influence on modern day liberalism cannot be understated) it still tries to incorporate varying views without coming to a crisis. The ultimate form of crisis, anything that would be viewed as right wing or authoritarian that doesn’t innately pursue alienation would lead to a crisis of political legitimacy for the existing political actors within that realm. You can see this in what Sobran was talking about in respect to Apartheid South Africa.

Liberalism and Marxism are variant forms of Alienism; so are feminism and "gay liberation," for that matter. Liberalism does all it can to accommodate its sister ideologies without overtly endorsing them; and it is bound to insist that the real peril to humanity is always some form of Nativism. This accounts for its obsession with the Nazi period, its endless search for old Nazis, its wild alarm over the most eccentric expression of neo-Nazism, and above all its attempts to link its enemies with Nazism. The liberal campaign against South Africa--whose racial caste system is far milder than the tribal caste systems of states like Burundi --is a symbolic effort to nominate a clear and present successor to Nazism, and the scale of material evil and suffering created by apartheid has nothing to do with its status in liberal demonology.

Anti-fascism has a fluid definition of fascism, which like “racism” or “equality” can fit any container as long as it rebels against the former self or stride of history. I’ve seen the late George Fitzhugh be called a “proto-fascist” while railing against laissez-faire capitalism in a way that rings out of Telos Press and Marx, but nevertheless it was because of his defense of the institution of slavery. It makes one wonder how much Stalin, Lenin, or Mao would be accepted today, mainly because the three of them were “homophobes.” In today’s power structure, what you might call liberalism, or its latest iteration on the grand scheme of history dominates all. A reactionary force, something that wishes to preserve what came before, a nativist, America First sense of politics is of course sidelined to either Truth Social or Cozy.TV, it is entirely sidelined or placed into intellectual ghettos or is spouted off in poorly written manifestos or incitements to violence by federal authorities. It is for most causes, toothless.

However the alienism, the xenophilia can be subtly and not-so-subtly used to accept re-writings of history. Cleopatra wasn’t black, Hans Christian Anderson didn’t write stories for melaninated youth, nevertheless it is all present and in your face.

Nativism is the belligerent moral self-assertion of the native; Alienism is the subversive insistence that all's wrong with the world. It can be illuminating to compare them, but they are not exactly parallel: Alienism is more subtle. It can use more discretion in deciding where to strike.

Whether on the history and national identity of itself, such as Biden saying Islam has been at the founding of American culture, or attacking the family through abortion sanctuary laws, all have found themselves striking at the core structures of what makes a civilized society possible. The woke might be more correct than the mainstream, but the woke are so inclusive of their own intersectional pet projects that the idea of a homogenous, high trust society with mentally ill people nowhere near you on the subway is anathema to them. Communism, or any sort of “new world” project of the leftist extremes, will always find itself siding with the slower, yet more powerful political machines like that of liberalism in the West and recently emerged democracies in the former Soviet bloc. Books like “The Demon in Democracy” by Mr. Ryszard Legutko is a good place to start if you want to see how that works, but Sobran gets to it much much earlier.

As Sobran reaches the end of this section,

Liberalism has succeeded brilliantly in controlling the perspective from which public discussion is conducted. It speaks piously of "the extremes of Left and Righ"--i.e., of Commnism and Nazism, Alienism and Nativism--while in fact it equates these two extremes only for the tactical purpose of helping one of them: it conceals its own alignment with the "Left," while assigning its conservative critics to the "Right."

In the same conversation with my liberal friend that I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, he remarked on how "right-wing" my views were. "I agree with James Madison," I said. "Is that 'right-wing'?"

"I suppose if Madison were alive today and held the same views he did then," he replied, we'd call him right-wing."

I suppose "we" could--we liberals, at any rate. I pointed out that the assumption that one has a duty to move "leftward" with history might be a left-wing assumption.

The weary image of left and right wings (if you can even call it an image) conveys very little, and indirectly expresses the perspective of the "Left" itself. What, after all, is the common denominator of constitutional conservatism, libertarianism, fascism, monarchism, and for tat matter Shiite Islam, that they should all be lumped together as "right-wing"? Left to themseves, in a world without Alienism, they would have bitter differences. All they really have in common is that they oppose the "Left." But that is enough. We speak of right and left wings because it serves the purposes of the Left that we should do so

We’ll end it here for today.

Like with much of this essay, Sobran highlights much of the same structural problems of politics and liberalism that are still presently with us in 2023, in an environment where the media control wasn’t as decentralized or as distrusted as it is now. Alienism, or perhaps just outright love of “the other” a sign that even my own language use is perhaps too peppered in the new left academic jargon of today’s colleges, illustrates an ongoing rhetorical and political trick that has been around for some time.

As Sobran points out for the “Native” American;

The native American has fallen for this con game. He accepts the most malicious construction of his own words and acts, while extending a courteous benefit of the doubt to his enemies. The motives of the Alienist are never called in question; the native lets the Alienist take his wallet, and doesn't even count the change. He grumbles a little every April 15, but he never makes a connection between liberal ideology, government spending, and his own tax rates. Least of all does he suspect how he is hated by these people whom e is constantly trying to assure of is good intentions. He takes for granted his assigned role as perennial defendant.

Feels very similar to a tweet by Auron today, doesn’t it.

We’ll continue this essay reading and reflection next week, more stuff to come on the Substack. I appreciate your patience while I’ve been away, a lot has happened which I will fill you in on in another post.

Until next time: